Various technologies have been developed to automate a production line for workpieces by replacing manual labors with robots. For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2008-009899 discloses an automatic teaching system for automatically teaching assembling work to an assembling work robot.
The automatic teaching system individually identifies various types of components randomly collected (hereinafter, referred to as workpieces) by using photographic images taken by a camera, for example, and compares them with correlate information of workpieces registered in advance so as to automatically generate a given procedure of assembling work per assembly.
However, conventional robot systems have room for improvement for enhancing throughput. For example, when a given procedure that the above-described automatic teaching system generates includes change of tools or materials to be held by the robot, the operation of the robot required for the change is likely to become a large overhead as the number of workpieces to manufacture increases.